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Dash Is Like FuelBand for Your Car

Dash is a new app that aims to turn your car, already a rolling data platform, into a safer, more cost efficient, and socially connected way to get around.

Fifteen months into the life of its development, Dash founders Jamyn Edis and Brian Langel are working with their 7–10 person team to get the smartphone-hosted app and its under-dashboard hardware into a beta version.

As they do so, they're about halfway to a $1 million fundraising round and the company recently won the grand prize in the U.S. Department of Energy's Apps for Vehicles Challenge.

Here's how it works. Dash starts with a "dongle" — a kind of hardware key — that plugs into a port with which modern cars are equipped, typically down near the base of the steering wheel. Your mechanic uses this port and their own type of hardware to diagnose what's wrong when something breaks. Dash uses the port to wirelessly pipe all kinds of vehicle performance details from the car's computer systems into your smartphone.

It interweaves this information with other data streams: your phone's internal compass and global positioning software, and your social-media profile, and a variety of online resources.

With all of this data flowing, Dash can potentially alert you to a pending crash — or at least tell you that you're braking too hard. So far, it's been generating super early engine-trouble alerts for its test users, beating their cars' Check Engine lights to the punch.

Dash also incentivizes better driving via a score system. Every trip you take with Dash gets scored from 0–100. As you score better — presumably saving gas and wear and tear because you're driving better — you're also competing with other Dash users for leaderboard status, badges, and discounts at, say, your mechanic's garage or your favorite coffee shop.

Following a test drive with Dash, we learned that we spent about 58 cents on gas during a mile-and-change trip. One hard brake (Dash politely spoke its warning to us at the time), but no speeding, and no hard accelerations. We scored a 44 out of 100. Not so hot, but, hey, we were in snarled traffic and had to deal with Lower Manhattan's maze of one-ways and double-backs.

After the test drive, we sat down with Edis and Langel to talk about developing and engineering Dash and the future for all of us behind the wheel.

Q&A With Dash Co-Founders Jamyn Edis and Brian Langel

You're building an app that has to talk to many, many kinds of automobiles and allow both iOS and Android users to do so easily. What kind of engineering challenge does that represent?

Edis: Our early hope was that we'd get one generic data set that comes out of any car. This is not the case! If you have a '96 Passat, or I have a '13 Ford, it's clear that those cars are 16–17 years apart and you have very different sensors in them. Or, there's the Prius, which runs on a battery and a combustion engine — so, when the data comes out, it's yet again showing slightly different things. That makes our testing, and our Q.A., a whole lot harder. Which is what makes what we're doing a tough engineering problem; which is exciting. We've tested 400 cars, so far. We're going to get to 1,000 before we launch.

Langel: We had to answer the question: Is that whole code base going to have to be duplicated for both Android and iOS? Luckily, it's not. A contributor on Google open-sourced a project that allows [the] code to be translated from what Android's written in to what iOS is written in. So, we are definitely leveraging that, and it's significantly helped.

What have you discovered along the way that's surprising about the technology, about what Dash can do?

Langel: We realized that the way cars are architected ... all the things you can do with a car internally, you can essentially do with this port. You can unlock it, you can turn on and off the headlights, you can open the trunk, control the radio — there's a lot here that we didn't even know about, getting in, and so now this is on our roadmap to add to Dash as advanced features.

I could start my car remotely, something like that?

Edis: Yes, we can do bi-directional control of the car. That was a real a-ha moment. We always thought we were going to only extract and analyze data. We didn't think about pushing in.

Q: What about broader implications for the app, now that you're this far into development?

Langel: We won something called Apps for Vehicles. It was a contest to take data from the car, open data like this, and do something interesting with it. So, winning that, we were invited to this event in Detroit. When I attended there were car manufacturers there, people in the government, EPA, as well as academics. A lot of the talk was around the connected car, meaning cars that can talk to each other, to say Okay, I should start braking because this car in front of me is braking, that kind of thing. But it's this big problem for manufacturers because ... it only works if they're all speaking the same language, right? If we can get Dash users' [data], and [that data] works across the board, we can start providing that connected future that automobile manufacturers have been talking about for years.

Edis: There's a way to use this data, non-corporate, that we hadn't originally thought about. We think we can use this for good.

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